Quebec Calls for Ban on Wearing Symbols of Faith

By IAN AUSTEN

September 10, 2013

OTTAWA — Quebec’s separatist government released a plan on Tuesday to ban government workers — from judges to day care employees — from wearing “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols.

The proposed “Charter of Quebec Values,” which would also require members of the public to uncover their faces when dealing with the government, generated widespread controversy after much of it was leaked to a Montreal newspaper earlier this summer. Critics have called the measure unconstitutional and xenophobic. But the Parti Québécois government has described its charter as a way to maintain a secular and cohesive society.

“What is dividing us is not the religious practices of another group,” Bernard Drainville, the province’s minister for democratic institutions, told reporters. “What divides us is the perception that citizens are getting special privileges and there’s inequality.”

Quebec’s measure is broader than France’s ban on covering one’s face in public because it includes more items associated with religions, including hijabs, turbans, skull caps and large crucifixes. But Quebec’s plan applies only to on-the-job attire of public servants as well as employees in government-financed programs like private day care. Elected officials are excluded.

Within hours of the announcement, it became clear that the new plan would provoke a constitutional showdown with the federal government.

Jason Kenney, the multiculturalism minister, said in Ottawa that if the charter were approved, the federal government would order a review by its Justice Department. “We would challenge any law that we deem unconstitutional, that violates the fundamental constitutional guarantees to freedom of religion,” he told reporters.

All major federal political parties condemned the plan, with the exception of the Bloc Québécois, another separatist group.

Tom Mulcair, a Quebecer whose New Democratic Party dominates the province federally, called the proposed charter “state-sanctioned discrimination,” and another Quebecer, Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberals, accused Quebec’s prime minister, Pauline Marois, of playing “divisive identity politics.”

The charter’s critics include some prominent supporters of Ms. Marois’s party, as well as teachers’ unions, religious leaders and human rights groups.

Ms. Marois’s comments after the leak of her charter plan intensified the debate by suggesting that Britain’s tolerance of religions and different cultures had led to terrorism.

“In England, they get into fights and throw bombs at one another because of multiculturalism, and people get lost in that type of a society,” she said in an interview with Le Devoir, a Montreal newspaper, last week.

Passage of the charter is not guaranteed because Ms. Marois’s party does not hold a majority of the votes in the Legislature. While the Liberal Party opposes it, there are indications that a third party may back the plan, which would allow it to pass.

If it fails, Ms. Marois is expected to call an election immediately that would effectively become a referendum on the charter.

Most immigrants to Quebec live in Montreal, whose City Council has already passed a motion against the plan and where there is little other apparent support for it. But concern that immigrants could erode French-speaking Quebec’s culture and undermine efforts to maintain a secular province is common in many rural areas where immigrants are scarce or nonexistent.

Chantal Hébert, a political columnist with The Toronto Star, wrote that the perception of a threat from other cultures and religions has more to do with news media reports than the personal experiences of the residents of rural regions.

“With the help of a fair amount of sensationalist reporting, the sense that Quebecers could somehow be dispossessed of their identity or that the provincial’s social order could be threatened unless that plurality is reined in is latent,” she wrote.

Many of Ms. Marois’s opponents have noted that while her party promotes secularism, it refuses to remove a large crucifix that hangs about the speaker’s chair in the province’s legislative assembly.

How to handle religious symbolism, particularly with immigrants, has long been a fraught issue in Quebec, which went from being dominated by the Roman Catholic Church to becoming among Canada’s most secular locations. Earlier this summer, the provincial soccer federation was suspended by the national soccer association for banning turbans and two other types of religious head wraps on players. After holding hearings throughout the province on “reasonable accommodation,” a commission issued a lengthy report in 2008 that found there was a “crisis of perception” on the issue of religion’s impact.